Imagination PowerVR Rogue GPU Vulkan Driver Merged Into Mesa 22.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination PowerVR Rogue GPU Vulkan Driver Merged Into Mesa 22.1

In addition to the Imagination PowerVR Series 1 code drop of their late 90's era driver code, Imagination Tech has managed to successfully land its new PowerVR Rogue "PVR" Vulkan driver in time for Mesa 22.1's release next quarter...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-22.1-PowerVR-PVR-Vulkan

[R41N3R]

I don't own any hardware that will benefit from this, but it's great to see this new Vulkan driver! Focusing on Vulkan only seems like the best approach as Zink works really well for OpenGL already.

[Nille]

In the past PowerVR was always something that i try to avoid, but its nice that times are changing.

[stormcrow]

I've looked at some ARM SBC hardware over the years that had built-in DSPs in them for amateur radio use and almost invariably they had PowerVR GPUs. I always went back to the less optimal using a PC instead. At least the PC had working drivers for the GPU be it AMD, Intel, or Nvidia which is important if you want to see the waterfall of the radio frequencies at anywhere near reasonable frame rates. While the GP CPU isn't optimal, it at least could keep up. Hopefully in a few months working accelerated PowerVR GPUs will be a thing allowing me to think about using such ARM hardware again when these trickle down into distribution releases.

[timofonic]

The hell has frozen, let the ice invade us. Nvidia next! Who said Open Source has no future?

[illwieckz]

I'm now waiting for https://mesamatrix.net/ to be updated. 😃️

Also what's good is that thanks to zink, that means OpenGL comes as an extra.

[pmarcelll]

I'm about to buy a Google Coral Dev Board Mini (released a bit more than a year ago) since the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ is out of stock everywhere and I don't have space for a bigger SBC in my half completed project. And since that board also has a PowerVR GPU (Series8XE, but still based on the Rogue architecture), I'm hopeful that they will extend support for it.

[RSpliet]

I'm about to buy a Google Coral Dev Board Mini (released a bit more than a year ago) since the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ is out of stock everywhere and I don't have space for a bigger SBC in my half completed project. And since that board also has a PowerVR GPU (Series8XE, but still based on the Rogue architecture), I'm hopeful that they will extend support for it.

You may have to roll up your sleeves for this one. From their communications I was under the impression that their current plan is to go deep (e.g. start supporting more and more of Vulkan as quickly as possible) rather than wide (as many cores as possible).

[DrYak]

I am sure that in some basement there's a retro computing/homebrew enthousiasts try to see if they can leverage some of this new code drop to better optimize the Sega Dreamcast PowerVR drivers.